ONE Website for Your Creative Needs

Tired of hunting the internet for good quality FREE images, video, audio, fonts, backgrounds and more? There’s a great site called Makerbook that’s done the hard work for you. They are “a hand-picked directory of the best free resources for creatives.”
Pastors, students, bulletin secretaries, communicators, designers, videographers and musicians…this site’s for you! It’s sure helped me!

Design

The Most Important Design Principle of All

Hierarchy – Make it easy for people to understand your message by showing them what’s most important.

Stock Photo Sites

We live in a visual culture. A picture can tell a thousand words. But good pictures usually aren’t free and grabbing pictures off the internet without permission is not fair to the artists. To be frank, it’s often stealing. So here are some sites that offer good quality pictures, some free under Creative Commons license, some affordable.

This site has some great short videos on illustrating different books/themes of the Bible. It’s created by Christians, but not Adventists, so in Revelation I believe there’s sometimes different interpretations of prophecy, but on the whole they are quite good.

Free Fonts

A nice looking font makes all the difference in design and the nicest of them aren’t found in Word. Good fonts usually cost money, but the site below has lots of great free options.

Font Squirrel – This the site the conference uses for all our free fonts. Lots to choose from.

Email Newsletters

Mailchimp.com – This is what we use for the Prairie News Online. It’s easy, FREE and has lots of great templates and tools to work with. Can’t recommend it enough.

I Contact – The Youth Department uses this email newsletter program and likes it as well.

GlockApps – Not sure if your email newsletter is ending up in everyone’s spam folder? Use this free website to find out where your emails are going. Provides tips to get your emails out of the spam folder too!

Websites

Adventist Church Connect

Free, customizable church websites from the North American Division. Beautiful templates, excellent support. Contact them today! You can usually reach them by phone and get questions answered in a timely manner.

Design Your Own

I only recommend this option if you have a dedicated TEAM for your church website and you have a succession plan. Otherwise, if one person does it all and then moves, you won’t be able to change or access your website. I’ve had 5 churches call me with this problem in the last year alone. Don’t let it happen to you.

Wix.com – Lots of good features for good prices, but once you choose a template, you can’t change it without rebuilding your site, so be aware.

Squarespace.com – Best bang for your buck if you ask me. Professional, beautiful designs, good support, great features.